Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Wednesday November 11, 2009 @01:00PM
from the do-you-need-newer-desktop-art dept.

PBH submitted a link to a really amazing composite image of the Milky Way released by NASA. They combined infrared, visible, and x-ray images taken by Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra to create one beautiful image to commemorate the 400 years since 1609, when Galileo looked up.

The sun is being occulted, the reflection of the rings are seen on the dark side of Saturn. Not to mention the little faint blue dot just below the thickest part of the outer bulry ring, on the left side is supposedly Earth.

Black holes (whilst black) have an accretion disc [wikipedia.org] of hot material that glows brightly due to compressional heating under the extreme gravity. You can see this as the glowing white regions to the right of the image

A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.

It's amazing how something so obvious in retrospect was such an intuitive leap forward in (ahem) the dark.

Telescopes existed for some time before Galileo, but in extremely limited quantities and mainly used for practical purposes, such as scanning for mast and sails of ships as they emerged in the horizon.

In those days, the church told you how the heavens went, and that was that. After plenty of leeway for intellectuals during the Middle Ages, a panicky Vatican was in full-tilt political damage control mod

I'm pretty sure the whole segmented spinal column concept wasn't invented until the late 16th century. Ever see portraits from that time period and earlier? They didn't just figuratively have sticks up their asses.

It was the first thing I noticed when I zoomed in. Well, after I noticed how much smog there is in the milky way. There should be an intergalactic summit on that - nobody should have to live with all that dust.

does anyone know where can I download huge versions of these kind of images? I always wanted to make a poster, I thought of getting a big enough one to make it 300 or 600 dpi at a large size (at least 1 meter width), and have it printed.

I have been thinking about trying to get a Milky Way composite photo large enough to print and mount as a false-ceiling in my home office. Then have it backlit so the night lighting in the room is worth kicking back every now and then to stare at in wonder.

There's an annotated image here [hubblesite.org], which inexplicably has a scale in light years/parsecs. I mean, it must be talking about at a particular depth, maybe the dust cloud the Hubble imaged? The arc-minutes/seconds scale, at least, makes perfect sense.

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space...

The image covers about 1/2 of 1 degree of the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. Given the 0.5 degrees of arc, the distance to galactic center (about 30,000 light years), I leave it as a simple math (trig) exercise to work out the extent of the photo in light years across.

Nah, no I don't. If we take the length of the triangle as 30,000 and the angle as 2 * 0.25 degrees ( to split it into two right triangles), then sin(0.25 deg) * 30,000 = 130.9 light years, times two, gives about a 262 light year wide image, which means each pixel at 1920x1200 covers a square of about 0.136 light years (1,286,631,860,000 kilometers) per side.

For comparison, that's about 8600 AU (Earth-Sun distance). The solar system to the Heliosheath (where the Voyager probes are) is about 100 AU. So each pixel is a square, 86 solar systems across.

Anyone know where the area of the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way is supposed to be located in this photo? Anyone with a version of this pointing out various popularly known astronomical bodies in the field? Some perspective would be cool to see on this starmap.

I'm just waiting for Google to send a fleet of their black vans around the Milky Way so we can see it all on Google Street View. Perhaps one day we will be able to see the view outside the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

I've long noticed that pure science articles don't attract many comments and even fewer intelligent one. It's simply that few except a passing astronomer would have anything significant to contribute. While many people have a xbox and feel the pain that something might break their toy. Not really depressing but close.